“Not really. I heard you and my aunt had a nice chat,” I say sarcastically, moving to the sofa. I kick my shoes off and tuck my feel underneath me.

“I was wondering if she’d mention that.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs. Between the two of us we do a lot of shrugging. Maybe that’s why I finally started talking to him. My shoulders just got tired.

“What did she say?” he asks, sinking down next to me.

“She said she wasn’t stupid and that I shouldn’t treat her like she is.”

“So are you not supposed to be here right now?”

“No. She’s okay. She just expects me to let her know where I am from now on. As long as I text her it’s fine.” It’s true. Margot did sit me down and lecture me. She made sure I felt the full measure of my lack of consideration for her and that I understood that if anything happened to me, she would be the one dealing with the wrath of my mother; a five-foot three woman who could strike fear in a berserker. But God bless Margot, because she wasn’t going to force me into a corner with rules and ultimatums, either, which was good, because I would have ignored them. Not because I wanted to rebel against her or because I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do, but because I wasn’t going to give up sitting in that garage.

“Look Em,” she said, “I’m not naïve. I was young, too. I’m thirty-two years old and I still have a list of stories I will never tell my mother, and if Charlotte was my mother, that list would be even longer, so believe me, I understand. But you also need to understand that you are my responsibility and beyond that I love you.” I think I cringed at that part but she ignored me and kept going. “You’ll be eighteen years old soon and I know exactly how futile it will be to forbid you to do anything, but I need you to respect me enough to let me know where you are and who you’re with and what you’re doing. If you do, we’ll be fine. If you don’t, I will not hesitate to throw you under the bus with your mother.”

She made sure to tack on that she knew I was a smart girl and that smart girls often do the stupidest things and then she hugged me and told me I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t judge me. I think it was her version of a sex talk.

I hugged her back because it was my only way to say thank you to her for letting me keep him without a fight. She wasn’t going to make it difficult for me to see him and I desperately needed something in my life that wasn’t difficult.

CHAPTER 25

Josh

“How’d you learn to cook?” The legs are swinging from my kitchen counter, not my workbench, tonight. She eats here all the time now. Sometimes she helps. Sometimes she watches. She always talks.

I reach up and open the cabinet over the refrigerator where my mother stored all of her cookbooks. She looks up at the overfilled shelf. I really only use a few of the ones in the front, but the cabinet goes pretty far back and the books are in there three rows deep.

“You learned to cook by reading cookbooks?” She raises her eyebrows.

“Isn’t that how most people do it?”

“Not most seventeen year-old boys.”

“I don’t think many seventeen year-old boys learn to cook at all.”

No response to this one. I didn’t say it to make her feel bad, but I think she does, because that quiet sets in. The quiet everyone thinks they should fill but they can’t because they’re busy trying to figure out what to say. So while they sit and think about it, the silence stretches out until there aren’t any words left that wouldn’t make everything more uncomfortable. All the ok things to say dissolved in the silence while they were busy thinking.

“If it sucks, can we order pizza?” she asks. Silence can’t win against her. It doesn’t intimidate her at all. When you spend over a year not talking to another living person, I guess you learn to manipulate the voids.

“It won’t suck,” I respond.

“Confident, aren’t we?” she mocks.

“I’ve been cooking a while.”

“How long?”

“Three years, give or take.” It was right around the time when my grandmother got too sick to do it anymore. About the same time I had to learn to use the washing machine and empty the vacuum cleaner.

“Since you were fourteen? Why?”

“I got tired of eating dry cereal out of the box for dinner every night, so one day I pulled out the books and started reading.”

“I can’t cook for shit.”

“You can bake.” Damn can she bake. She brought those peanut butter cookies over last week covered in sugar with a criss-cross pattern across the top. As soon as I looked at them, I remembered that my mother used to make them, too, but I had completely forgotten. And it made me wonder how many other things about her I had forgotten.

“Not the same thing.”

“You could learn to cook if you wanted to. I’ll even loan you a cookbook if you want,” I say half-sarcastically. She doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about that. “It’s not that hard.”

“Maybe not for you. We can’t all be awesome at everything like Josh Bennett.” She makes me sound like a renowned jackass.

“You know how many meals awesome Josh Bennett effed up in the beginning?” Now I’m making myself sound like a renowned jackass.

“Enlighten me.”

“Let’s just say I didn’t quit eating cereal for the first few months. And even then, my grandfather and I ate a lot of dry, overcooked food.”

“You could have eaten at Drew’s house every night.”

“Yeah, if I wanted to put up with Drew every night.” I’m not that much of a glutton for punishment, but she’s right; I was always invited.

“He is your best friend. Not that I have any clue how that happened.”

“We were in Little League together. When everybody started dying and everybody else started ignoring me, he didn’t. He just kept coming back and coming back, even when I tried to get rid of him. Eventually I realized he wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Sounds like Drew.”

Sounds like you, too, Sunshine.

“Little league?” she asks, smirking.

“Didn’t last,” I say. “Once I realized that I was more interested in figuring out how to make a bat than how to swing one, I quit.”

She’s watching me chop vegetables, but I know she won’t offer to help with anything involving hands and sharp knives.

“I messed up everything I baked in the beginning, too,” she tells me, switching back to our last conversation. I find that hard to believe. I imagine she came out of the birth canal holding a cupcake and a spatula.

“When did you start?”

“When I was fifteen.” She looks down at her left hand, turning it over and staring. I assume she’s done talking, because I’m used to being answered with a bare minimum of information from her. Intentionally vague is about as good as it usually gets, but she surprises me and keeps going. “My hand got messed up and I had to do a lot of physical therapy. They suggested that I knead bread dough to build strength back. At some point, I figured that if I was going to spend so much time kneading the dough, I might as well bake the bread.” She coughs out a laugh.

“Easier said than done, I take it.”

“Understatement.” She smiles unguardedly, and it’s at war with everything I’m used to from her. “The first time, I don’t think it rose at all. It was just this flat, hard, disk-shaped thing. My dad ate it anyway and said it wasn’t that bad. You should have seen his face trying to chew it. I don’t know how he did it.” She hasn’t stopped smiling while she tells me this. I’m watching the memory play across her face and I realize that I’ve completely stopped chopping the vegetables and I’m just staring at her. I force myself to start chopping again before she notices. “I tried again and again and again. It was always one issue or another. I just couldn’t get it right. It pissed the crap out of me.”

“Did you finally give up?” I ask, and she looks at me as if the thought is outrageous.

“There was no way I was being brought down by a stupid loaf of bread. I went through so much flour. My mom had to start buying yeast in bulk. Once, I got so pissed, I threw the dough at the ceiling. I thought my mom was going to ban me from the kitchen when she found me on a step ladder, trying to clean it off with a bench scraper. But I finally did it. It took months, but I eventually ended up with a decent loaf of bread.” She shrugs, looking back down at her palm and folding her fingers over. “Hand got stronger, too.”

“Do you still bake it? Bread?”

“Hell no.” She snorts as if this is the most absurd question I could ever ask. “It’s a pain in the ass. Takes too much time and it’s a bitch to get it to work with the humidity here. I just had to know that if I wanted to, I could. I like the stuff that’s full of sugar better anyway.”

She tilts her chin toward the cutting board in front of me. “I think you chopped those into submission.”

I glance down at the red peppers I’ve annihilated while listening to her talk.

“Not my fault that you’re distractingly pretty.” I have to take a minute to confirm to the pissed off part of my brain that still works that, yes, in fact, I did just say that. And I don’t know if distractingly is even a word. If it is, it’s a stupid one. Like me. Ignoring it and pretending it never happened seems like the best possible plan at the moment and I’m hoping she’ll go with it, but she does the next best thing.

“Drew says I’m sexy as f**k,” she shrugs blandly and lets me off the hook.

“That, too,” I smile, not meeting her eyes as I scrape together what’s left of the red peppers. I pour oil into the bottom of a sauté pan and line up the vegetables on the counter. “Turn the front burner on to 8.” I point at the stove and she reaches over to do it just as the front door opens, which shuts us both up.

“Hey, what’s go‌—‌” Drew stops mid-sentence when he sees Nastya. I don’t know if the shock registering on his face is from the fact that she’s here, sitting on the counter like she owns the place, or the fact that she’s almost unrecognizable to him. She’s wearing white denim shorts and a pink t-shirt and the make-up is long gone from her face, which you can actually see because her hair is pulled back and braided. She looks younger, like she always does like this, and running along her hairline, you can see the jagged scar that she’s constantly trying to cover up. I’m used to this Nastya, but I know Drew’s never seen her looking even remotely like a real girl, and I’ve never once mentioned it to him.

I don’t know if not telling him was a betrayal. If it was, I should feel guilty and there’s a part of me that does. But I feel justified, too. Even if it is selfish. He can be pissed if he wants. It would still be worth it.

Nastya slides down from the counter and I think she’s going to leave me to deal with explanations, but she doesn’t. She steps across the kitchen, opens the upper cabinet where I keep the dishes, and pulls out another dinner plate. Then she grabs an extra set of silverware from the drawer and places them on the table. Drew walks to the table, pulls out a chair and lowers himself into it. He hasn’t taken his eyes off her yet. Like he’s trying to work out the truth of her. It’s the optical illusion again. My eyes have adjusted to it, but he’s still trying to find the focus.

“So, want to introduce me to your girlfriend?” he asks, looking directly at me now. There’s more curiosity than malice in the question. He might also be just a little bit impressed.

“Not my girlfriend.” I hand Nastya the trivets to put on the table with one hand and keep stirring with the other. I don’t look at her face on purpose.